


Songs of the Angels

by StarlightBreeze557



Category: Original Work
Genre: (Very brief), (also very brief) - Freeform, Angels, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I don't even know what the fuck to tag this honestly, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Light Dom/sub, Metaphors, Origin Story, Other, Piano, References to Depression, Tags Are Hard, it's not a happy story at first, kind of, no beta we die like men, piano music as a metaphor for writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 14:15:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30023028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlightBreeze557/pseuds/StarlightBreeze557
Summary: This is a story of a girl who grew up with music and angels as a salve to her own misery, lost them, and found them once again.
Kudos: 1





	Songs of the Angels

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, guys! I'll preface this by saying that I have no fucking clue what this is or why I wrote it. A lot of it was pulled from deeply personal places, but some of it wasn't. Some of it just kind of spilled out of my hands while I was typing like it'd been waiting for years to be said. 
> 
> This is absolutely full of metaphors, and the language is so flowery at times that I'll be surprised if anyone understands this but me. In any case, it's not like I can use this in a book, so I thought I might as well publish it here. I hope you enjoy! <3
> 
> Kudos make my day and comments validate my existence, so please feel free to leave those, if you want :) I hope you have a wonderful day/night!
> 
> ~ Em

When she was young, her mother had sat her down at a piano and told her to play. And so she did. The girl loved playing. She made beautiful sounds, and she loved reading music and letting each different song, each _story_ , flow through her with every note she played. It was beautiful. 

When she was young, her father would tuck her in at night and tell her that the angels would keep her safe until morning light. She wasn’t sure what angels were supposed to look like - or sound like, for that matter - but whenever she imagined them, she imagined them like the notes of a song on the piano; beautiful, breathtaking, and each one a bit different than the last. 

The angels were like people, she decided then. People _and_ pianos. They were all beautiful and different in their own way and, above all else, they were _good_. They were pure, untainted. Even if they did things that she didn’t like, they were _good_ down to their very core. And she really believed that. For seven happy years, she believed that. 

As she got older, she began to learn that eventually dust turns to stone, stars fall from the sky and burn millions in their wake, and if angels were like people, then there was no point in believing in them at all. 

~ ~ ~

Memories came in black and white, rarely with colour. They were like fragments of a videotape rather than clear photographs. She couldn’t remember everything. But she remembered enough. 

She remembered a bottle; it was dark, and full of amber liquid that smelled so bad it made her want to throw up. She remembered that the bottle was always by her daddy’s side, and if it wasn’t, the amber liquid would go into a camouflage-printed coffee cup that he carried with him to work. 

It didn’t bother her at first. Mommy said it was okay, so it must be okay. There wasn’t any reason to worry. She sat down and played her piano whenever he opened his bottle at night, and it helped. It didn’t fix, but it helped. 

With time, certain memories began to bloom in colour, pretty memories that were like the rises and falls of a Mozart piece. They were memories of sunshine, of play and innocence and freedom. Those were the memories that she liked. They didn’t have the same bitterness as the amber-liquid memories or the black-and-white memories of broken plates and screams and blood on the carpet Mommy loved so much. 

It was those memories that she held onto, playing her piano well into the night after the others had gone to sleep. Her big brother tried to act like he minded, growling at her to let him sleep, since she always played downstairs, right next to his bedroom. But it was an act, and she knew her brother well enough to see right through it. He didn’t mind, not really. If it kept her happy, kept her safe, then he would let her do just about anything she wanted. 

Time wore on, and the memories gained a scarlet tint; sometimes it was blood, sometimes it was tears, and sometimes it was words unsaid that choked her until she gave up & gave in and the cycle reversed itself. 

She was miserable in those memories. None of the others knew it, but she heard everything. She couldn’t play the piano loud enough to drown out the sounds, couldn’t use her foot pedal hard enough to erase the knowledge written in her heart of what happened behind closed doors. Her pieces became sad, melancholy; the music teachers at school were always asking if she was okay, if she had considered that she might be depressed, but she didn’t know what that word meant. 

The only word that she _really_ knew at that point was “No!” and all she knew about _it_ was that it didn’t matter. 

She wore dresses sometimes, when she wanted to feel pretty, but soon they burned her skin and hurt her heart even more than the eyes that stared through them at parts of herself she had never wanted anyone to see. After that, she drowned in baggy sweatshirts and cargo pants and hoped no one would notice. 

(She was sure they did, but like everyone else in her life, they said nothing.)

Soon the piano music began to fade, and that was the most heartbreaking part of it all. She could endure the black-and-white memories, the amber liquid, even the scarlet-tinted ones. She could _take_ it all, she could survive, but not without her music. Not without the angels. 

When the music began to fade, she knew that a part of herself was fading, as well. Soon there would be nothing left. 

Her brother, who used to smile whenever she played her piano, stopped looking in her direction altogether. Her mother, who had taught her to play piano in the first place, sold her piano to the nearest person who would pay. It was useless, she’d said, and it broke the girl’s heart. 

Truthfully, she’d been hoping that someone would stop her. She’d been hoping that someone would notice and care and pay enough attention to see that she loved her music and she didn’t know if she could live without it. 

But, like everything else in her life, no one did. 

~ ~ ~

Years passed, and the girl would almost say that she had forgotten how to play at all. She didn’t think the angels were like people anymore; no, she thought that people were like people, and angels were like angels. One was real. One wasn’t. And the one that was real was so much worse than she had thought when she was young. 

That, perhaps, was why it surprised her so much when someone looked at her twice when they could have looked at her none, when they said that she had angels on her shoulder and love in her heart and asked if she would play for them. 

She didn’t want to say no; it wasn’t in her nature to refuse anyone anything. But she _couldn’t_ play anymore, not like she’d used to. She couldn’t play the songs of the angels anymore because she didn’t know who the angels were. She didn't believe in them. If they were supposed to be so _good_ and so beautiful, why did they allow the world they loved to drown and rot and turn black with ugliness that infected everyone it touched?

If angels were real, then that meant they didn’t care, and if they didn’t care, then _no one_ cared. The angels were the last thing she could hold onto, and she didn’t believe in them because she knew she had no choice. They couldn’t be real, because if they were, it would unravel everything. 

And yet, still she agreed to play. She put her fingers to the piano for the first time in years, and she began to play. 

The notes were rough, and she’d forgotten her favourite pieces, but to her surprise, the music was still there. 

It was like it had never left. Like it had been waiting for the perfect moment to show her that it could be played again, that she could have everything she wanted as long as she was willing to sacrifice some of herself to them, as well. 

And the girl wasn’t good at much - no, her talents were few and far between - but she was good at sacrifice. And so she did. 

She gave pieces of herself to them, handing them cracks in her heart and telling them how to close them up or how to make them bigger, whatever they decided they wanted to do. It was terrifying, and she was scared, but they assured her that they meant what they said. They told her that they kept their promises, and for the first time since she was young and believed in angels and thought her mother was singing at night, she believed them. 

And for a very long time after that, she believed them. 

It ended up being important for her to remember that not everything that shook her faith should destroy it, and she learned to forgive. 

She learned to forgive when her someone opened another bottle just like her father’s, same amber liquid and same hazy memories that she only knew flashes and faults of. She remembered how she shook, and how she cried and begged and told them that she would give them anything they wanted, just _please_ don’t do this. 

She’d screamed and she’d sobbed and she’d _pleaded_ , but nothing she did was good enough. Nothing was better than the amber liquid and the abject peace it represented, and when the bottle was gone, she knew another one would take its place. She tried to get her someone to look at her, but they refused; she tried to get her someone to talk to her, but they were silent. She tried everything she knew, but they liked the amber liquid better, just like everyone always had. 

The amber liquid _was_ better, she realised; it didn’t ask questions, or try to touch them and distract them from their task. The amber liquid was loud, though; ugly and angry and mean. It made her someone yell at her, snatch the bottle away and shatter it against the wall she’d painted, breaking her favourite picture frame. It was okay, though. If the amber liquid helped, then she couldn’t tell her someone no. 

Instead, she played the piano, hoping her someone wouldn’t notice. They were being too loud and too angry and too mean to notice, she thought. She looked through frames upon frames of pictures and tried to play them all, tried to write them all, but she could never say what she wanted to. The amber liquid was still too loud, even when it was quiet. 

More time passed, and the girl wondered if the amber liquid would always be a part of her life, drowning and choking the people she loved. She wore black then, as she wondered, and she didn’t let the others see her cry. 

Only the angels saw her cry, and they had promised they wouldn’t tell. 

She broke her fingers that night, playing until she couldn’t anymore. She stained the keys with her blood, and slumped over her piano bench gasping for air. She wasn’t expecting someone to let her breathe. 

By the time her fingers were healed and the blood was scrubbed from her piano keys, she could breathe again. She had a new someone to thank, and they were different from the last someone. Not bad-different, but different-different. They thought differently, and they spoke too fast and said too much and not enough at the same time. This someone was like fire, burning so hot that sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t about to get trapped in the blaze. Sometimes she wondered if her someone would remember she was there before they ignited the fuse. 

Regardless, she quickly found that if her someone _was_ a fire, they burned white-hot. White was the colour of the angels, and it used to be her favourite. Now she liked blue, because it was real and pretty and didn’t look bad with bloodstains. She thought she might always like blue, but white would always hold a special place in her heart, too. 

Years passed again and she woke to a thunderstorm, lightning sizzling the power lines and thunder shaking the trees. She was scared. She used to like storms, before, but now they only reminded her of other nights and other wounds and the people she used to love who told her she was foolish for her heart, and that loving in such a world would never do her any good. 

She climbed out of bed, even though the rest of the world seemed to be telling her not to, and made her way to her someone’s place, slipping into their arms like she belonged there. She didn’t, but for that night, she could pretend. Imagination was always better than the reality, anyway. 

She didn’t tell her someone about the storm when they asked; she said it was stupid and left them to wonder. The lightning had burnt her one too many times. 

It took a long time for the amber liquid to come back, and this time she’d been on her knees for her someone, cut open and loved in a way that made her willing and able to do anything for them, and she was scared again, even more scared than she was of storms and lightning and angels. 

This time, she got on her knees again, and she told her someone that she would do anything for them. She offered herself to them, whatever they wanted, and told them that they could have it, have _her_ , if they never picked up the amber liquid again. She was crying just like last time, pleading, wondering if her someone could hear her. They didn’t pick up the amber liquid. It stayed there, all night, the sight of it making her cry, but they didn’t pick it up. Their fingers brushed through her hair, gentle and calm, and she thought that maybe she might be able to have it all. 

It was respect, she learned later, and consideration. Her new piano teacher taught her to play r-e-s-p-e-c-t on the keys, and her someone kissed her on the mouth and told her they were proud of her. It had taken years to get to that point, and she was proud of her, too. 

She found that she didn’t still believe in the same angels as when she was young; no, the black-and-white memories took care of that. She wasn’t sure those angels had ever been real, anyway. But she _did_ believe in the angels of the present, and she thought that they might be what mattered, anyway. 

Her someone wasn’t always white, and the amber liquid didn’t always stay gone, but it always stayed where it sat when she begged them to listen to her again. They always listened, and sometimes it confused her, but she tried her best to understand. They understood. Sometimes she thought they might know more than her about who she was and who she used to be. 

For a very long time, her someone wasn’t always white. It was years before she realised that maybe no one was all white all the time. Maybe the angels let some darkness through their doors, too; maybe they accepted her into their gates even when she felt like she’d turned herself all black all over again. 

Maybe the songs of the angels that she knew, were the angels of the who. 

It took a long time for her to remember that her someone wasn’t always an angel, and it took a long time for her to realise that angels only existed where she could look. They were hard to find, angels were, and sometimes she didn’t believe enough to see them. Sometimes they didn’t believe enough to see her, either. And maybe they didn’t watch her through the night, but they always did their best to keep her safe until morning light. 

Even with her memories and her black, she knew she could play on. She made music again, beautiful music like when she was young, and she created smiles again. She loved again, and she fell again, and her someone loved her just as much and fell just as hard. The music surrounded them, and she was free. 

The songs of the angels were gold, and sometimes she had to strive for silver, but her intentions were always good, and the gold she could sometimes reach, too. She began to learn that the silver was just as important as the gold, and she grew to love both. 

Even if she had once believed they were, the songs of the angels weren’t white. It was her music that was white, tainted and impure. It was her music that folded around her and wrapped her in an embrace like the real wings of the angels, and she was happy. 

Her heart was settled, and the world was white, and finally, she was happy. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! <3


End file.
